Missionaries photograph gravestones in Prairie Home Cemetery for genealogical database

Two young missionaries, volunteering for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spent a little time in New Rockford beefing up a growing database of graves in Eddy County.

Sister Christensen and Sister Simpson went row-by-row photographing grave sites in Prairie Home Cemetery north of town. The pair have been serving in the Bismarck area as part of an 18-month mission to North Dakota.

Simpson and Christensen said they felt called to North Dakota, and for Christensen, it was family ties that led her here. Christensen recently discovered through familysearch.org, a genealogy site managed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that she has ancestors who lived in New Rockford.

Her great-great-grandparents, Ralph and Charlotte Terpening, moved to North Dakota from Michigan seeking work in the early 1900s. The couple settled in New Rockford, where Ralph was involved in the meatpacking industry. Christensen said Charlotte gave birth to three or four children while in New Rockford. Among them was her maternal great-grandmother, Lois R. Terpening.

While her great-grandmother only spent the first nine or 10 years of her life here, Christensen said she remembers her telling stories about North Dakota. One of the things she said was that it was really cold, but really friendly, Christensen recalls.

"I know they loved this community, so I wanted to give back to this community," she said.

The Terpenings then moved to California, where they worked on a farm together with another family. Lois and one of her playmates from the other family "grew up together" and later married, Christensen said.

Sister Simpson agreed to accompany Christensen on the trip to New Rockford because she knew how important it was for her to better understand where her family lived. From New Rockford they traveled to Grafton, another N.D. community from which Christensen has family connections.

More specifically, their work here in New Rockford consisted of taking photographs of grave sites and uploading them to a worldwide database called Billiongraves.com. The website has an app that uses the GPS capabilities on a user's phone to pinpoint the actual location of the grave they are documenting. While in the app, the user takes a photo of the grave. The photographs are then uploaded to the website, where other volunteers transcribe the individual's name, birth and death dates and any other information on the stone or marker to identify the person buried there.

The data from billiongraves.com is searchable by name and/or cemetery, and even birth or death date if known, so anyone conducting genealogy research has the opportunity to find the graves of their ancestors. A search for "Wobbema" on Tuesday morning yielded 586 results; however, many of them were lacking photographs. There were 117 images uploaded and transcribed for Prairie Home Cemetery, and none appeared to be the ones photographed by the Sisters. It is all user generated, so of course it takes time for volunteers to transcribe the photos before they can be viewable and searchable in the database. There are also duplicate entries and misspellings, as well as entries with very limited information.

The database on billiongraves.com also feeds into popular genealogy websites such as ancestry.com and familysearch.org, making the data accessible to families across the world conducting genealogical research.

Collectively, Christensen and Simpson's missionary group has photographed quite a few cemeteries throughout their service area, which includes North Dakota, South Dakota and parts of Minnesota and Nebraska. They also assist the Great Plains Food Bank, which serves the communities in our area, as well as the Heaven Helpers Food Kitchen.

Ultimately, their goal is to spread the message of Jesus Christ. "We're here to do what Jesus Christ would do and serve the people around us," Simpson said.

"We teach people about him, follow His example and do our best to do good wherever we go," Christensen concluded.

Editor's Note: Readers, have you kept in contact with the Terpening family or know if there are other relatives who remain in the area? If so, and you'd like to connect with Sister Christensen, please contact us at the Transcript, and we'll help you get in touch with her.